156 Obituary. 



earlier, to the English Lakes they called on the poet Wordsworth, 

 who took them a walk up the slope of Fairfield, and showed them 

 Silene acaulis in flower. Alfred Bennett attended the classes 

 at University College, London, and took his M.A. degree about 

 1856, and his B.Sc. some years afterwards. After leaving college he 

 acted as tutor for a short time to Gurney Barclay, the banker, and 

 whilst there was thrown from his horse and sustained injuries which 

 left him an inheritance of insomnia from which he suffered all his 

 life. In 1858 he married Katharine, the daughter of Wm. liichard- 

 son, of Sunderland, and in the same year entered into business as a 

 bookseller and publisher in Bishopsgate Street, E.C. He was one 

 of the first publishers who used photography in the illustration of 

 books. I remember specially a pretty little volume on the Abbeys 

 of Yorkshire with photographic views of each of them. At this 

 period he was both proprietor and editor of the Friend, then a 

 monthly, now a weekly journal, specially devoted to matters inter- 

 esting to the Society of Friends, of which he was through life a 

 member. He published the early poems of the poet-botanist, the 

 Hon. J. Leicester Warren, afterwards Lord De Tabley. He gave up 

 business about 1868, and in that year became a Fellow of the 

 Linnean Society. Up to the time of his death he was one of the 

 most regular attenders of the meetings of that Society, took part 

 frequently in the discussions, and served more than once as a member 

 of the council and vice-president. He took great interest in the 

 higher education of women, and in 1869 he and his wife opened their 

 house in Park Village East, near the Gloucester Gate of the Regent's 

 Park, as a home for a limited number of ladies who came up to 

 London to attend classes at the Bedford College and elsewhere. 



From 18/1 to 1873 he wrote several papers on flower- fertilisation 

 and kindred subjects. A list of nineteen papers written at this time 

 will be found in the second series of the catalogue of scientific papers 

 published by the Royal Society. The best known are his ' Observa- 

 tions on Protandry and Protogyny in British Plants ' (Journal of 

 Botany, vol. viii. p. 315), and his paper on the fertilisation of 

 Parnassia in the Journal of the Linnean Society, vol. xi. p. 24. 

 These papers brought him the acquaintance of Charles Darwin, who 

 encouraged him with characteristic kindness. About 1870 he began 

 his studies on the Polygalaceae, of which he contributed a synopsis of 

 the Indian species to Sir J. D. Hooker's 'Flora of British India,' 

 and of the far more numerous Brasilian species to the great ' Fl< >ra 

 Brasiliensis,' published at the expense of the Brasilian Government, 

 and edited in succession by Endlicher, Von Martius, Eichler and 

 Urban. In 1873 his father died. About 1875 Alfred Bennett and 

 the writer took a long walking tour together in Switzerland. We 

 visited Chamounis, Zermatt, and the Bernese Oberland, and although 

 it was rather late in the year, we identified two hundred species of 

 Phanerogams which neither of us had seen in a living state before. 



